• Source: Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky (born 1966) is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world (in a "second wave" after the work of Christopher Middleton), translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded the MLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation of Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck. In 2024, Bernofsky was reported to be working on a translation of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
She teaches at Columbia University. In April 2024, she was one of 23 Jewish professors at Columbia (including six Barnard College professors) to sign an open letter to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, calling congressional investigations of antisemitism on university campuses "a new McCarthyism" intended to "to rehearse and amplify decades-long bad-faith efforts to undermine universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production" and alleging a widespread effort to silence "Palestinian narratives and analyses on campus." The letter she signed declared that "today’s attacks on the university [because of alleged climate hostile to Jewish and Israeli students] are not truly about antisemitism." A shorter version of this letter was published in the Columbia Daily Spectator.




Books


Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale University Press, 2021)
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (co-editor with Esther Allen, Columbia University Press, 2013)




Translations






= Robert Walser

=
Looking at Pictures
The Walk
Berlin Stories
The Assistant
Microscripts
The Tanners
The Robber
Masquerade and Other Stories




= Jenny Erpenbeck

=
The Old Child and Other Stories
The Book of Words
Visitation
The End of Days
Go, Went, Gone




= Yoko Tawada

=
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
The Naked Eye
Where Europe Begins
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, New Directions Publishing, July 9, 2024, ISBN 9780811234870




= Selected others

=
The Metamorphosis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) by Franz Kafka
Perpetual Motion by Paul Scheerbart
The Magic Flute (Mozart opera libretto) by Emanuel Schikaneder commissioned by director Isaac Mizrahi for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis
The Black Spider (New York Review Books, 2013) by Jeremias Gotthelf
False Friends by Uljana Wolf
Siddhartha (Modern Library, 2006) by Hermann Hesse
Celan Studies by Peter Szondi
The Trip to Bordeaux by Ludwig Harig
Anecdotage: A Summation (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996) by Gregor von Rezzori




References

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Robert Walser
• The Black Spider
• International Dublin Literary Award
• Susan Bernofsky
• Yoko Tawada
• Jenny Erpenbeck
• Robert Walser
• Siddhartha (novel)
• The Metamorphosis
• Paul Celan
• The Black Spider
• New Directions Publishing
• 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupations